A sequence of reflexive tweets and comments about the Russia probe from the White House and Trump's legal team has spectacularly backfired, suggesting that the administration was knocked off balance by news of Michael Flynn's plea deal and raising questions about whether its struggles reflect a deteriorating legal position for the President.

The fallout from Friday's bombshell consumed several days when Trump should have been highlighting his biggest political win yet after the Senate passed a tax reform bill, and may well have deepened his legal and political jeopardy.

Comparisons to the chaos, confusion and disinformation that raged in the first weeks and months of Trump's presidency -- before Chief of Staff John Kelly began to impose comparative discipline on the White House staff, if not the mercurial President -- are appropriate for another reason.

Key events from those days, including the decisions by Trump to hire and fire Flynn as his national security adviser and his fateful decision to oust FBI Director James Comey, are haunting the President to this day and are at the heart of his exposure to the Mueller probe.

The dysfunction should also concern Trump's supporters, since he is up against the most revered prosecutor of his generation, in Mueller and a team of crack lawyers picked from top blue chip law firms.

Dowd's comments begged a damaging question that drove a day of bad headlines: Was his argument motivated by a conclusion that Trump had indeed obstructed justice?

Michael Hayden, the former director of the CIA and the National Security Agency, told CNN's "New Day" on Tuesday that the decision by Trump's team to resort to technical arguments may reflect Trump's legal jeopardy.

"When you own the facts, you argue the facts. When you don't own the facts, you argue the law," Hayden, now a CNN national security analyst, said.

"What we have seen since Mike Flynn's guilty plea last Friday is now the administration is trying to argue the law rather argue the facts. To me, that is very revealing of what is happening behind the screens."

Most legal scholars concede that the law is inconclusive on whether a sitting president can be indicted on a criminal charge. But the idea that a President cannot face obstruction of justice charges in an impeachment proceeding run by Congress defies precedent.

Dowd's defenders also point out that in Trump, he hardly has the ideal client, given the President's propensity to stoke political firestorms in a way that could undermine the work of even the most diligent legal team.

Late Monday night, another White House lawyer, Ty Cobb, sought to clean up the apparent disarray inside Trump's legal braintrust, downplaying the idea that questioning whether the president could obstruct justice would be at the center of the team's strategy.

"It's interesting as a technical legal issue, but the president's lawyers intend to present a fact-based defense, not a mere legal defense," Cobb told The Washington Post. "That should resolve things, but we all shall see."

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In many ways, the President is responding to a legal challenge with an unrestrained political strategy -- as evidenced by his assaults on the credibility of the FBI and Mueller and his unsubstantiated claim that Hillary Clinton had told far more lies to the FBI than Flynn.

Such an approach may represent an eventual hedge against possible impeachment proceedings and an attempt to bolster support among GOP lawmakers.

But it makes Dowd's job much harder and may explain his missteps.

"I think that's what happens when you conflate being a defense lawyer with being a PR flack," former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste told CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Monday.